


b8 & d7 (or: mulder and scully see a psychic)

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 15:05:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17246381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: once upon a time long ago @kateyes224 sent me a prompt asking for mulder and scully to see a non-hacky, palm and tarot card kind of psychic. i finally did it! i apologize that she is, in fact, kind of a hack.s7. post-millennium. a new year's fic. kind of.





	b8 & d7 (or: mulder and scully see a psychic)

There’s blue light reflecting off the sidewalk, glowing from down a hop-skip of stairs on Connecticut Ave. Mulder walking with a sort of pronounced limp, even though–and she reminds him of this, tugging his sleeve but gently–it’s his arm that’s sprained. He leans on her like she’s keeping him up or pulling him over or both. Like he’s finally got that peg leg.

The angle he’s tilted at lets him see it first. Although, of course he  _would_ , doesn’t he  _always_.

“Scully!”

He points with his uninjured hand, suddenly standing up very straight all on his own, thank you very much. Scully rolls her shoulder. The blue light is neon, warping the edges of a huge, thin hand. Inside the palm, in tiny, tubular script the sign reads: PSYCHIC! OPEN. They’ve walked down this block a hundred times, on the way from the hospital to her car or his, depending on why they were in the hospital, on who was playing hero, and never noticed it, this kitschy cosmic high-five. (Tonight it’s her car.)

If she didn’t know the world like she did–which is to say, like a scientist, like a Big Bang Believer–she would think that these things didn’t  _exist_  so much as manifest in Mulder’s general vicinity, winking into existence. And on the seventh and final day, Mulder said let there be crawlspace psychics and bloodsucking glow bugs. And zombies, it’s always best to remember the zombies. And there were.

The conjurer in question turns to her with a Bridge-to-Terabithia-face. A Look-What-I-Found-In-The-Middle-Of-Nowhere-Face. A  _I’m_ _a little bit hopped up on painkillers but not so much that I don’t know what’s going on and I kissed you about it face._

“ _Scul-ly._  We have to.”

Scul-ly cocks her head. “You only have one hand.”

“But you have two. And together,” he hooks his one hand around her neck like a picture book pirate, “we make one very successful juggler. Let’s go.” Lowers his voice. “I’ll buy you your fortune.”

Once, years ago, after a long but lowkey case somewhere outside Kentucky, Mulder had managed to find her the worst Chinese food place in the county. The only Chinese food place in the county. Because, post-chemo, it was all that sounded good and the food was hot if it wasn’t otherwise edible and sensation was more reliable than taste, lately, and when they’d paid Mulder had cracked open both fortune cookies, styrofoamy and stale, and unrolled them carefully with the pads of his fingers. Hers had to do with cups and emptiness. He’d kept both in his pocket, just in case.  _Your lucky number, Scully, is 42. The answer to everything. Can you remember that?_

So. A little after midnight and, freshly kissed on the New Year’s, having driven her car to the hospital to rescue him, she’s a little more inclined to live in the world however he makes it. And there were. She is a little inclined to nod, to think, _Yes, Mulder, there is a Santa Claus._

To let her fortune unravel depending on how he cracks open its hard shell.

–

Melissa’s room always smelled like a head shop. Like nag champa over weed over thick shag. Madame Zelda’s (“Madam  _Whom_?” she mouths to Mulder and he elbows her with the plasticky blue edge of his sling) haunt is the same. A low-ceilinged, low-lit, compact little room. Zelda sits front and center, heels hooked precariously on a tall bar stool, sucking hard on a thin cigarette holder and shuffling tarot cards so fast that the sound is like rain. She is big dark glasses and small, delicate hands. She is ambiguously old with an unambiguously fake accent. When she’d first spoken to them (“Vat are you here for?”) Mulder had tapped his incisors.

_Vampire, yes?_

_Idiot, no._

_The Cranberries_  play softly from somewhere further off and back, although Scully can’t see from where, can’t make out the place’s dimensions except to say that it  _looks_  small and  _feels_  big, like a darkroom or a hide-and-seek closet.

“Uh.” Mulder clears his throat. “We’d like to purchase a reading.”

“Who ees ‘ _we_ ’?” Zelda flicks her cigarette. “Eet ees not a couple’s massage.”

“Um. She would. Well. I would. For her.”

So inarticulate, her post-zombie, drugged up Mulder. So full of I love yous and stilted politeness–which, in the end, were almost the same.

The cards snap. “Past, present or future?”

Scully looks straight ahead. The walls are draped with long cords of beads. Mulder shrugs. “All of them?”

“Ohh,” Zelda coos. Looks up for the first time. Her eyes are a muddy brown. “Big man. But no. You must pick just ze one. Past ees good for…skeptics. History ees easy to prove.”

“Who said I was a skeptic?”

Zelda narrows her eyes. “I do not hear voices, Mees Scullee. No one is  _zaying_  anything. I  _know_.”

Later tonight, Scully thinks she will drive very slowly back to Mulder’s apartment, hugging the curves on the freeway. She thinks she will sit him down on his bed and give him a plastic cup of water in case he knocks it off the nightstand–which he sometimes does–and three Advil and she won’t just set it down on the counter or his table–which she sometimes does–she’ll put it right in his hand. And then she will kiss him squarely on the mouth. She thinks she’ll do this, she’s been thinking about doing this since they were walking down Connecticut, skipping cracks. She thinks but she doesn’t know.

And with a kind of blank, blanket terror, an empty C.O.D box on the autopsy form, a question she couldn’t answer in her third year of med school, Mulder squinting at her in that way he does, a  _Well? Scully?_ It’s the inability to prove herself before she actually does anything that always stops her right cold.

“Future,” she says primly, looking hard at Zelda. “Mulder, I want the future.”

–

Mulder leans up flush against her back before Zelda leads her behind a periwinkle curtain.  _You_ , she’d barked.  _You stay._

He whispers, “Remember: ze power of Christ compels you.”

The press of his lips against the back of her head makes her whole face go hot.

“Wrong movie.” She doesn’t turn around. “Wrong  _entity_.”

Behind her, Mulder clasps his hands over his heart like a man staked.

–

The back room Zelda steers her into is impossibly cavernous. Mary Poppins’ bag yanked open wide at the mouth to reveal a long pinkred tongue of carpet and blueblue curtains. In the center is a little black table and a big glass ball on filgreed crows feet.  Scully feels fifteen, feels Melissa, feels trapped inside the cover of  _Bella Donna._

“Zo,” Zelda begins, her accent flagging. She holds her hand on the table palm up, holds Scully gently around the wrist. “You are single.”

Dana Scully does not like to admit that she is a little bit  _defensive_. That Bill used to be able to push only three to four of her most obvious buttons to provoke a full on shit fit. Dana Scully says, tightly, “Well.”

Zelda grins with just the corners of her mouth. “Not married,” she says, wiggling the tip of Scully’s ring finger between her glittering nails. When she breathes close it smells like mur and not nicotine, like she’d been smoking long thin sticks of incense. “Zat is vat I mean.”

Scully, who is not defensive, thinks, oddly, of witnessing Mulder’s will two months into their partnership and keeping S’mores Pop Tarts, objectively the worst flavor, in her cupboard. The low shelf where he started putting all his mugs. Thinks about the delicate, formal intimacy of two beds on  _The Andy Griffith Show_. Of Just Good Enough For Network TV.

She says, “ _Well_.”

–

Mulder kicks around Zelda’s lair turned waiting room.

A bony vending machine rests up against the left wall and he stands in front of it like it’s an open refrigerator in the middle of the night.

Occasionally, and at poorly timed intervals, he feels a strong desire he assumes that Scully would inform him is somewhat evolutionary. Sitting at work at 2:47PM on a Tuesday, maybe, and what he suddenly wants to do most is give Scully  _things_. Not defined things, really, just…things. AT 2:48PM on a Tuesday in the office, with limited access to things, he will sometimes set the stapler he knows she’ll need before turning in her report rather primly, but still heavily, on her desk. He will say her name until she looks up. He will then nod sagely at said stapler.  _Thanks, Mulde_ r.

Anyways. He is, among other things, an idiot. Still. He’d given her a kiss tonight and feels like he can do better. He feeds the vending machine three dollars and it eats two of them. He presses B8 and D7 and almost sprains his other arm fishing the sodas out.

He slips one into each trench coat pocket, like stones. Like anchors.

–

Zelda’s long nail bisects the line closest to her fingers and presses.

“Hm. You were close to your father, no?”

Scully squeaks. “That’s in my loveline?”

–

When Melissa was thirteen and Dana was eleven, she had stolen a Ouija board from their two-doors down neighbors’ house. As red patches of rug burn worked their way into their knees and elbows, they used to lean over the planchette with a votive candle burning. Melissa always started.  _Hello, spirits, when will Dana stop being such a little sneak? OK. Sorry. I mean, are you here? Can you see us right now?_

Zelda is peering closely into what appears to be the center of her palm. Scully shifts uncomfortably. It feels very, very early. But Zelda’s cuckoo clock still reads midnight.

“You have seen,” Zelda is saying. “But also, oh, this ees better, you have  _been_  seen.”

Once, Melissa accused her of cheating, of pressing hard on the planchette to keep it still. She grabbed her fingers right off the board, holding her hand up to her face.  _Yup. Just as I thought. Says right here: Dana Katherine is a scaredy cat. Should we ask the board? Is Dana scared?_

“Mees, are you listening?” Zelda blows a breath through her nose, drops her hand. “You know. I don’t peddle this shit for cheap. You want to waste your boyfriend’s money, that’s on you.”

“I’m sorry.” She blinks. “Sorry. I’m…I don’t do things like this very often. It reminds–I guess it makes me a little tense.”

Zelda smirks. “You scared?”

“I didn’t–”

Melissa always touched the planchette very lightly. When she touched it, it said:  _YES._

Zelda waves her hands. “Ees alright to be scared. Ees good. You vant your future now?”

Scully nods. “Please.”

Maybe she is overeager, a little sister, a little frayed by memories of her big sister with her big rings, holding her hands like this. Curling her toes at the edge of the carpet at Melissa’s door, which was a different color from the hallway, and  _Missy? Can I come in?_

When they were done, Melissa would close her eyes and guide the little arrowhead over every letter of the last line on the board, even though Scully said that wasn’t how it worked. Melissa said it was polite. G  O  O  D  B  Y  E.

Zelda softens. Drops her accent entirely and leans forward.

“Here is a secret first: It is not cosmic, babygirl.” She pinches gently at the skin of Scully’s upper arm, a little Jedi Master move:  _Not this crude matter_. “It is very, very human.”

–

Scully is always beatific, somehow, under fluorescents. A connoisseur of the neon aureole. Our Lady of the Motel and the Late Night Diner. She’d come very quietly out of Zelda’s little back room–a closet-like space, from what he could see–and ushered him out the door.

Now, standing just down the steps below him, under Zelda’s flickering palm, she looks a little dazed, a little like she had after he’d kissed her.

“Hey, Scully.” He waves a hand in front of her face, fluttering his fingers. “You okay? What’d she tell you?”

Scully blinks and realigns her vision with his midsection. “Did you steal something?”

“Did I–What?”

She steps forward, putting one hand at a time on his stuffed pockets. “You cannot possibly be this happy to see me.” Smiles up at him and he  _blushes_ , thinks,  _Our Lady of the New Year._  But means our in the royal way, which is to say in the singular.

He extracts a Fresca from one pocket and a Sprite from the other. Scully flashes him her Presents! face and he feels innately good somehow. Prying the Sprite out of his hand, she says, “For me” but not like a question.

He shrugs. “Somethin’ sweet.”

For a moment, holding each other’s stare, they both think of Texas. In hindsight, it feels swashbuckling, almost, and right now, for the length they look at each other, it has the sweetness of a shared joke, a half-spoken thing.

Mulder shifts. “So?”

“So what?”

“What’d she tell you? Ze Vampire Queen?”

Scully thinks of the glint of Zelda’s nail over her lifeline.  _You’ve seen. You’ve been seen._ History is easy to prove. And she likes proof  _so much_. Likes it better than anything except for him. The Sprite is too cold to drink outside at 1am in January, but she does anyway, cracking it open with a pop.

“Oh.” She pauses to sip, reveling in holding so many cards at once. “That.”

“Scully.” A whine.

She grins rather brilliantly. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“She told me,” Scully takes the steps one at a time, and he forgets to step back onto the sidewalk, so she is suddenly right there shrugging and smiling at him. “Nothing.”

The promise of the fizz pop kiss of her, whenever it arrives, renders him temporarily dumb. In college, he’d once popped a champagne cork so hard it broke a window and they’d all rushed not to clean it but to look up and out, as if the glass had been separating something vital. As if there was some previously severed connection between themselves and the stars now mildly restored.

“Huh.” He swallows, running his free hand down her short, sharp hair to land against her jaw. “Guess I still owe you that future then.”

Scully shifts, shoves her cold hand into his long coat pocket and waits for his to join it. Above them, Zelda’s hand flickers and goes out, but the dark it leaves them in is blue.

She looks up, up at him. His hand finds hers in his free pocket, and she presses their palms together. She smiles. She says, “Guess so.”


End file.
